Apple took a greater share of the tablet market during Q1 and, in a remarkable turnaround, will continue to do so through 2013, market watcher NPD DisplaySearch believes.
The exceptionally bullish DisplaySearch even reckons more tablets will ship in 2016 than notebooks.
Thus far the consensus has been that Apple's market share …

COMMENTS

2013

Nobody can predict 2013 shares, never mind beyond. Windows RT and Windows 8 may prove appealing. Android 5 may be a compelling product. iPad 4 may bring a breath of fresh air into the iPad space. Or any or all of these may be a disappointment.

WebOS

Re: WebOS

+1 for webos having a better GUI design. Enyo sliding panels are great. I hated the swipe-window-away feature at first but now I love it. Multiple window stacks on-screen are also good.

However, even gingerbread has better text editing/selection. The lack of mpeg2 decoding is a real pain. Not being able to dismiss skype notifications without calling the person back is also a bit annoying. Especially as notifications stack.

A great version 1 device. Its a shame it was sacrificed to MS licensing deals.

It does appear that you can get enyojs on chrome, so there is some transfer to android. I'm not sure how far it goes.

Re: WebOS

It has a couple of nice bits of UI design, but gets a lot of the basic stuff wrong. I played with my firesale Touchpad for a few days, then slung it in the toybox. It's now been resurrected with CyanogenMod 9, and Android ICS pisses all over WebOS for speed and usability, even in the CM9 Alpha build.

.. Could Be

Not to quote larry ellison - but engineered systems for the consumer market are a great solution.

Mac's love 'em/hate 'em. simplified the user experience with the i-devices. link them to the mac os - drives consumption across the brand.

While Android is growing rapidly as the other Operating Environment, it lacks the simplified continuity that apple created.

90% of my work as business leader is done on my iPad (yep even upgraded to the latest model w/LTE, do have some of the WiFi connectivity challenges that were reported earlier. Manage to work around this by getting off my ass and moving to another spot).

Samsung has the ability to solidify the andriod experience from phone to tablet but then what?

Download Keynote/Pages/Numbers/Word/Excel/PowerPoint to your android device for content creation etc. Open Office could almost be a fill-in sure.

MS is not embracing Android, Apple is not embracing Android. Could it change? sure. Will it?

Luck or exceptional for-thought Steve J and crew did what Bill G and crew wanted to - It just depended on the technology catching up to the vision.

android on x86/64

I can't see it

Google have a reputation to live up to, and basic Android has never felt like a product they care about. The unskinned version is so, so ugly; it's trying to be futuristic in a very awkward way. It feels like it's been created by a separate design team to their real flagship products like Gmail and Maps. ChromeOS Aura, by contrast, looks gorgeous: subtle and translucent. Once I would have agreed with you (and Android's take-up is greater) but now I'm starting to think they're taking ChromeOS seriously as a platform.

The next problem is apps. Android without a touchscreen is no fun at all, no apps that work well. I think user experience would work better with WIMP using a different platform to touchscreen rather than having lots of users disappointed because they're using the wrong software for their computer.

My final problem is I can't imagine Android for PCs or ChromeOS being released for novice users for PC upgrades. The odds of them either messing up bootloader installation or partitioning on someone's old wreck and creating 'Google broke my machine' stories is pretty high. I think neither will ever be available for PC users officially (ie through Google).

That said, Windows 8 is one heck of an opportunity for both Android for x86 (touchscreen PCs go mainstream) and ChromeOS (everyone hates Windows 8) to displace the 'soft from the desktop. So we may see one or both going into x86 general release.

The big three need to take the bull by the balls

I think the big three (HP, Dell, Lenovo) and maybe even the big 5 (fill in the rest) need to realize that Microsoft isn't going to help them compete against Apple, and do they really trust Google with Android ? Now if you look at the Linux desktop, its not looking so bad anymore. So why don't these three commit resources to some form of Linux desktop (my favorite is KDE). Ten or Twenty milion dollars would buy a lot of full time developers for a Linux Desktop (Throw in another ten mill to get a first rate office suit).

Yeh sounds kind of crazy, but no more crazy then riding shot gun with Microsoft at the wheel driving you to oblivion.

Maybe

Interesting idea. Windows 8 is shaping up to be a disaster and we all know this was HP's intention with webOS. So I could see it. But I'm not sure about Linux as the system of choice. I have Kubuntu in VirtualBox on my MacBook Air, so I know what you mean and switch between them regularly. It's good all right. But there's still a lot of need to drop into a terminal that OS X has evaded. Not OK for novice users.

I prefer ChromeOS as a starting point: faster and it has a complete segregation from conventional Linux. It has the user-friendliness (everyone's used Chrome already), tons of web apps and a controlling supporter with a lot of money.

On the other hand, it could fail. Android has become a fragmented disaster even if some forms are quite good. I suppose on a PC with more power to spare that might not happen, but given that all the OEMs selling android wanted to distinguish themselves with their own custom interface/skin I doubt it.

"This forecast estimates that in 2016 more tablet PCs will be shipped than notebook PCs,"

I'd bet against that.

My tablet cost almost as much as my notebook. If I want to make notes in meeting, I need a proper keyboard - the touch screens methods simply aren't fast or reliable enough. If I need a proper keyboard, I might as well take the notebook instead of the tablet. Then there's the tablet's lack of processing power/memory/storage and the tablet apps being baby versions of what I have on the notebook. The tablet is fine for reading documents and emails, web browsing and the like but whenever I need to do some real work, I go back to the notebook or the desktop system and the tablet tends to be gathering dust.